Life Strategies, Dr. Phil Flashcards
Sadly, it seems that the more successful you are, the more people take pot shots at you.
If you don’t step up and fight for yourself no one else will. What makes a problem big is simply that it’s your problem.
When the world starts coming after you, you had better have yourself a really good strategy and know the rules of the game or the bad guys will be dividing up what used to be yours.
Ask yourself am I really headed where I want to go or am I just out there wandering around. Is what I am doing today really what I want to do or am I doing it not because I want to but because it is what I was doing yesterday.
If you are habitually practicing poor life management skills, you are playing with fire. You may not be getting away with as much as you think you are.
The divorce rate in the United States is estimated by some authorities to be as high is 57.7%, and the average length of new marriages is 26 months. 62% of our society is obese.
My dad had taught me there are times in life when you just don’t want to miss a good chance to shut up.
Using your knowledge makes you the one in control.
People know what buttons to push to get other people to move in their direction and adopt their ideas. Life is not a dress rehearsal.
Open your door tomorrow with a commitment to pay attention to how people are behaving and why.
Once anger or hurt enters the mix, your objectivity will give way to self preservation.
And you will never ever fix your problems by blaming someone else.
Honestly evaluate your style of engagement, and you will begin to understand why the world responds to you as it does.
Stop being a victim take the wheel. Begin to consciously purposely and actively create experiences that you want, instead of suffering through experiences that you don’t want. Climb up and out of that rut and look around.
You cannot illuminate your negative behavior without understanding why you do it to begin with.
In the child’s logic screaming behavior brings about comfort and pleasure.
If your spouse does not get attention for pouting or throwing a tantrum, the behavior will disappear, because it does not work.
People only sustain behavior if they are getting payoffs.
Our demand for immediate gratification creates an appetite for a small pay off now rather than large pay off later. My note, this includes mindless eating instead of keeping a healthy weight.
Seldom did either partner in the marriage come to me and sincerely say, Dr. McGraw, I want our marriage to work, no matter who is right. What both of them usually said, in effect, was I want you to recognize that I am right, and convince my spouse that I am right, so that we could do things my way.
It takes courage and commitment to be brutally genuinely honest with yourself.
I will not lie to myself.
Life rewards action!
You may choose to ignore the truth, but that will not change it.
Every single person approaching the end of their life wished that they had done things which they had not.
It is true that life presents windows of opportunity. Every moment in which you failed to take purposeful action is another moment wasted. The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things losers don’t want to do.
Take action and insist on results.
Fixed beliefs. You have stop seeking or receiving and processing new information. You are treating the belief as fact it will no longer subject to debate or modification. In this condition you will not only miss new information you will overlook important changes in yourself or other people that would negate the fixed belief.
Your mission is to stop the momentum and direction and you now have, and replace them with the momentum and direction you want.
Obviously if you don’t require much of yourself, your life will be of poor quality.
Ask yourself occasionally, what can I do today to make my life better?
Stop Going with the flow, start your own river instead.
Sometimes you make the right decision, and sometimes you have to make the decision right.
If you don’t like the way you are behaving, find out what you were doing that encourages that behavior so that you can realize the relationship in a more healthy direction.
You teach people what they can get away with and what they cannot.
When people are aggressive, bossy or controlling, and this works, meaning they get their way, you have rewarded them for unacceptable behavior.
If you back off, you are teaching your partner that you can be handled. Remember the principle of reciprocity; you get what you give.
When you harbor hatred, anger, and resentment, your bodies chemical balance is dramatically disrupted. That means that all these things are absolutely incompatible with your peace joy and relaxation. People are not built to be happy and sad at the same time.
You ask yourself why do I want a fancy car and a high-paying job? Your true goal then is not a car or a high-paying job but the specific feeling that you associate with having those things if you can recognize that it’s not the thing you really want but instead the feelings that you associate with it, then your goal shifts from the thing to the emotions that are connected with them.
Willpower is unreliable emotional fuel experienced at fever pitch, it may temporarily energize your efforts; once the emotion is gone however the train stops.
Major life changes don’t just happen; they happen one step at a time.
If you have areas in your life that are working, figure out why and do it again and again and again.
You are not an adequate or incompetent when it comes to a relationship. The brutal and sad fact is that the deck has been stacked overwhelmingly against you.
You have never gone to a class that taught you how to understand your emotions.
Your relationship is in trouble because you set it up that way.
A bad relationship cannot exist if it is not fed and nurtured in someway.
You cannot control your partner, you cannot make changes for your partner, you can’t tell your partner what to do, but you can inspire your partner. You could give your partner a whole new set of behaviors in a new set of stimuli to respond to, if you drop out of the destructive mindset and vicious circle of mutually frustration.
interactions that are causing your relationship to implode; if you drop out of the fight and start living a new way, it is going to be difficult for your partner to continue spewing and seeking venom you. You cannot sabotage yourself and your relationship, and he could start inspiring the kind of reactions you want from your partner.
The tenant laws of life:
You either get it or you don’t
You create your own experience
People do what works
You cannot change what you do not acknowledge
Life rewards action
There is no reality only perception
Life is managed it is not cured
We teach people how to treat us
There is power in forgiveness
You have to name it before you could claim it.
Future notes:
